Authors Publish Guiding Principles

Authors Publish was founded by two creative writers who wanted to encourage other writers to publish their work and establish themselves as authors. Since the very beginning our principles have guided every review we have ever written and every article we have ever published. For the first time we are formally publishing our principles along with explanations.

The principles are listed in no particular order, all are important to us.

1. We always pay our authors

Each and every article we post is written by someone who was paid to provide their thoughts on writing, novels, working, a publishing company, or a literary journal. Many creative writers are not paid for their writing elsewhere, so while we do not publish creative work directly, we try to support creative writers financially, even if it just a small amount of money.

We also make sure that every author gets a link to their biographical statement and website. If they have a Facebook author’s page we promote that along with their articles. One of our authors has gone from under 100 fans to well over 1000 largely due to our promotion of his page.

2. All the publishers we review do not require agents or previous publications

Many big name publishers will only look at your work if an agent submits your manuscript to their company. This agent is acquired by submitting a query letter and part of your manuscript to a number of agents. This agent gets a portion of all your earnings if a publisher accepts your book.

We have written articles about acquiring an agent, but we only review publishers that read manuscripts directly.

3. We do not have any relationship with the publishers we review

We choose the journals and presses we want to review. We never receive anything when we review a journal or press; no one ever pays us in order to receive a review. Occasionally a press or journal will contact us seeking publicity, and we occasionally review these presses, if we find positive information about them from reliable sources. These presses can never make it onto our “Best Of” lists, because we prefer those lists to feature presses we found on our own. Our reviews are unbiased and often include conditions or concerns we have about a press, if we have any.

4. We research all the publishers to make sure that they are legitimate

Before we review we always research. We used to do at least some of our research on Preditors & Editors, a well-respected online database, but they became woefully out of date and closed their doors, at least temporarily.

We never review a publisher that charges their writers anything. That publisher is not a legitimate traditional publisher.

5. We do not feature markets who charge a fee for all submissions

When we published our list of the best literary journals open to submissions in 2013, someone emailed us to inquire why Ploughshares was not on the list. Our answer was simple: Ploughshares charges everyone who submits electronically 3 dollars. They do not charge for postal submissions, and they justify this by saying that postal submissions cost the writers about the same amount of money (in truth it should cost no more than $1.50 to submit by mail). The fact is that you should not have to pay any money for your work to be considered for publication.

6. All markets that we list are open to submissions regardless of writers’ nationalities

We have readers from all over the world; therefore we would never list a journal that is only open to work from one country or region. A lot of the journals we review are not even based out of America: we have reviewed journals from the UK, China, Canada, and many other countries.

Hopefully after reading this article you will understand how we work and how we are always focused on supporting writers. If you have any questions or comments, please email us at support@authorspublish.com

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